Job snobbery assessed

Press, 8 July 1976, Page 1

Job snobbery assessed

PA Wellington Professional people, academics, and Parliamentarians still top the list of jobs with the greatest snob value.

Other jobs with prestige appeal are those of airline pilots. weather forecasters, judges or magistrates. and secondary schoolteachers. Those with the least status are bootmakers and chimney sweeps, ditch and grave diggers, tractor drivers, and labourers. Where jobs fit into the social pyramid is described in a survey released this week by Dr Warwick Riley, of the Educational Research Council, and Mr J. C. Irving, of Victoria University. They took 315 specific occupations and ranked them by attaching equal importance to their income and educational reauirements.

The scale is used to test the representativeness of samples, to decide the class of jobs and city’ suburbs, and numerous other researches.

“Father’s occupation correlates very highly in many developed countries with other indices of socioeconomic status,” they said.

It closely related to the educational level and income of parents, their material possessions, the aspirations of their children. and delinquency. They found that topclass jobs included doctors and accountants, librarians and lawyers, university people and Parliamentarians.

Next down the scale came announcers and journalists, art gallery

curators and insurance salesmen, ministers of religion, and ships’ captains.

The middle classes ranged from bank officers and clerks, farmers and power station operators, to warders and watersiders, bricklayers and nurses. Least prestige want to freezing workers and ditch diggers, housekeepers and process workers. „ The study put 14 per cent of New Zealanders in the upper classes, 30 per cent in the lower classes, and the rest in the middle classes. “Farmers had dropped one level since the 1966 census, doubtless because of their less-favourable economic position in recent years,” the survey noted.